Category Archives: Healthcare

Did Justice Roberts Help Romney and Provide a Path to Repeal ObamaCare?

Blog Discussions, Democrats, Economics, Election '12, Healthcare, Independents, Libertarians, Politics, Republicans, Supreme Court, Taxation, The Contributors, The Welfare State, Theory and Ideas

Over at Red State, Erick Ericson theorizes that Chief Justice John Roberts joined the majority opinion as a way to put ObamaCare back into the hands of the political branches to decide the law’s fate:

The Democrats have been saying for a while that individual pieces of Obamacare are quite popular. With John Roberts’ opinion, the repeal fight takes place on GOP turf, not Democrat turf. The all or nothing repeal has always been better ground for the GOP and now John Roberts has forced everyone onto that ground. Oh, and as I mentioned earlier, because John Roberts concluded it [the individual mandate] was a tax, the Democrats cannot filibuster its repeal because of the same reconciliation procedure the Democrats used to pass it.

It seems very, very clear to me in reviewing John Roberts’ decision that he is playing a much longer game than us and can afford to with a life tenure. And he probably just handed Mitt Romney the White House.

Our own Doug Mataconis said he “would not be surprised to see it be a 6-3 decision” way back in April for the following reason:

Ordinarily, the most senior Justice in the majority gets to decide who writes the majority opinion. However, if the Chief Justice is in the majority he gets to make that decision. If Kennedy ends up voting to uphold the mandate then I could see Chief Justice Roberts joining him so that he can write the opinion himself and make the precedential value of the decision as limited as possible.

Erick Erickson also mentioned on his radio program that many conservatives and libertarians who aren’t thrilled with Romney as the nominee will put aside their objections and vote for him if it means repealing ObamaCare.

I hate to say it but I think Erickson has a point. ObamaCare being upheld is a game changer. Prior to this decision that was supposed to strike down all or part of ObamaCare, I was absolutely certain that I would enthusiastically vote for the Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson rather than settle for the lesser of the two evils. With ObamaCare being upheld, now I have to say I’m not so sure. I’m not normally a single issue voter but if ObamaCare isn’t stopped and soon, we will be stuck with it for at least a generation.

The problem is though, it might already be too late. Several things have to happen just right. First Romney must be elected and the GOP must take control of the Senate and hold the House. Second, we have to trust that Romney and the Republicans in congress will actually follow through. We’ve been disappointed before.

Stephen Littau
http://fpffressminds.blogspot.com/

Individual Mandate Upheld as Tax

Economics, Healthcare, Hope n' Change

The Supreme Court has upheld the individual mandate as valid under the Congress’ taxing power in the Constitution. Disappointing, but not surprising.

The worst thing about it is that the individual mandate is really a one-shot delaying tactic. The law can only mandate people into the insurance market once. When health care spending continues to rise after the mandate, insurance premiums are going to have to rise along with it. So, really, the Supreme Court has upheld Congress’ ability to use its taxing power as a punitive measure in the service of a cheap trick.

Two predictions:

1. Health care premiums initially hold flat in 2014 as insurers get more customers via the mandate, then start rising faster than they were before.
2. Congress finds more ways to exercise its taxing power as punishment for non-compliance.

Folks, it’s going to get fun.

Quincy

Protecting and Serving Whom?

Crime and Punishment, Dumbasses and Authoritarians, Fascism in America, Freedom, Healthcare, Know Your Rights, The War on Drugs

Today, I had the joy of observing an officer of the Newton Police force take a bad situation and make it worse.  The incident showed much that is wrong in the relationship between the common citizen and the government that is there to protect him or her. An elderly person had fallen and a police officer detained her, kept her on a brick side-walk so that EMT’s from an unwanted ambulance could check her out, an operation that blocked traffic and slowed it to a crawl on a major thoroughfare. » Read more

tarran
I am an anarcho-capitalist living just west of Boston Massachussetts. I am married, have two children, and am trying to start my own computer consulting company.
https://thelibertypapers.org/author/tarran/

Tomasky: Kill personal freedom for government and crony capitalist well-being

Corruption, Culture, Democracy, Doublespeak, Dumbasses and Authoritarians, Economics, Freedom, Healthcare, Individual Rights, Liberty

Michael Tomasky penned a sickeningly ignorant and immoral piece in the Daily Beast… even more sickening than he considers sodas and 1/2 pound hamburgers. The most stomach-turning part:

We have this “liberty” business completely backward in this country, and if Bloomberg can start rebalancing individual freedom and the public good, God bless him, I say.

Got that? Individual freedom has to be balanced with the public good.

But, wait, you say, ain’t we the public? Not in Tomasky’s view:

The costs to the health-care system are enormous, so the public interest here is ridiculously obvious. Obesity is a killer. Are we to do nothing, in the name of the “liberty” that entitles millions of people to kill themselves however they please, whatever their diabetes treatments costs their insurers?

The health-care system is a hybrid crony capitalist/government enterprise. Health coverage in its current form exists because of myriad laws and regulations. Hospitals and clinics are highly regulated. Doctors and nurses must pass through regulated courses of education. In every way that matters, government has been driving for decades.

Washington has created a system where certain private, individual behaviors create a drag on the system. Therefore, it’s now in the “public interest” to limit commerce to discourage individual behaviors that cost the system money. Unlike with communicable diseases like tuberculosis, obesity inherently affects only the individual. The “public interest” here is entirely a construct of government.

Now, let’s restate Tomasky in a more truthful fashion:

We have this “liberty” business completely backward in this country, and if Bloomberg can start rebalancing individual freedom and the well-being of the government and crony capitalists, God bless him, I say.

I’d say those who are opposing this have ‘this “liberty” business’ quite right.

Reason.com has more on this.

Quincy

The Birther Distraction Only Benefits Obama

Civil Liberties, Conspiracy Theories, Constitution, Culture, Democrats, Doublespeak, Dumbasses and Authoritarians, Economics, Election '08, Election '12, Healthcare, History, Hope n' Change, Human Rights, Independents, Media, Military, Multimedia, Politics, Republicans, Security, The War on Drugs, The Welfare State, Theory and Ideas, War on Terror

There it is again. That damned conspiracy theory about Barack Obama being born not in Hawaii but Kenya. An honest question for you birthers out there: even assuming that everything you believe about the birthplace of Barack Obama is true, do you really think that even if you could prove it 100% that people who would otherwise support him/undecided would choose not to or would be declared ineligible to serve as president by some court, perhaps SCOTUS?

IMO the answers to those questions are no and probably not. If the voters are not concerned enough to vote him out (or even call for his impeachment) based on his other, much more damaging assaults on the Constitution, I seriously doubt these same people are going to be upset about Obama’s audacity to be born to an American mother outside the country. As far as violating his oath to defend the Constitution goes, this would be quite a minor assault.

So if the birther issue doesn’t benefit Obama’s opponents, who would it benefit? President Obama and the Democrat Party. The Obama campaign has already released an ad critical of Mitt Romney and his ties to Donald Trump (below).

This is precisely the kind of issue President Obama wants to be a part of this campaign. If the media and the people are talking about the birther question, they are not talking about his failed economic policies, his continued assaults on free market capitalism, ObamaCare, signing extensions to the Patriot Act, signing the NDAA, Fast and Furious, his drug war hypocrisy, his foreign policy befitting that of a warlord, his very Orwellian change in the definition of the term “civilian” to make his statistics for killings of innocent people in foreign lands not look so bad to the casual news consumer, and etc. In other words, Obama’s record as president!

I hear people complain that Obama wasn’t properly vetted in 2008 (and to a certain extent I agree). The media didn’t concentrate enough on the birth certificate, his time hanging out with Marxists in college, his unwillingness to release his college transcripts, his association with Jeremiah Wright. Some of these things are reasonable questions but are distractions to the issues of the greatest importance.

It may be true that we don’t know a whole lot about Obama’s biography or what made him the person he is relative to past presidents but we have had four years to evaluate his job performance as president. In the final analysis, isn’t that all that really matters?

Stephen Littau
http://fpffressminds.blogspot.com/
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